Breaking Ice on The Roof

My place, 1/11 2013

Apparently 10 days ago i myself cleaned the leaves from the gutter above the bedroom, using a stick and a hose cause they started to stink. Weather was fine, but it took me several hours, to get them from the balcony with a long stick with a hook at the end.

Here in Oregon the weather is under freezing several nights, mabye a couple of weeks in total in a year. Mostly during night time.

Today it was frosty and holiday but they came to clean the leaves from the other gutters in the building.  Leaves, of course frozen in the gutters that were full if they were like mine. I don't know how they had the guts to walk on the frosty roof like that. And the energy. Those two Mexicans were all day on the roofs until night and they didn't seem tired to me. It's their business, after all.

But they hammered the gutters for a couple of hours and everything inside was shaking like hell. People who don't live in wooden houses don't understand. Then they climbed with a power blower and blew whatever it was left on the roof. After a couple of hours they moved to the next building. When it though everything was over, a big diesel truck from a towing company came and shook everything for 15 minutes with a different frequency.

My place, post date

How Chest Pain Works

There are more and more numerous and sometimes irreconcilable theories about why chest pain occurs as a symptom of a heart attack. The funniest i heard of so far (actually i heard it in a radio show) is the one that says that they are due to a genetic anomaly. That is some people have some sort of shortcuts in the nervous system, presumbably at the spine level that transmit signals of a heart attack perceived by the brain as chest pain.

That's when i knew that there is yet another crisis in the theory of medicine. 

None of these theories, besides this last fantastic one can explain the variations and the asymmetry. Cause some people have silent heart attacks, with no pain. There should be major genetic differences between people to explain it and that's not the case. Then the asymmetry. It's always the left area of the chest or left hand. So that's when i started thinking, since i'm no stranger to temporary chest discomfort and even pain and had an episode of atrial fibrillation with rapid ventricular response (when i drove myself on the middle of the night (ambulance showed after i left) on black ice and a quarter inch of frost on the windshield to the hospital, with the pulse oximeter on the finger showing 200+ then on the freeway when there was no ice i went all the way to 90 mph because my truck has a speed limit sensor, for about 2 minutes that seemed an eternity 'till i reached the hospital.)

I believe it's the posture that triggers it. Your body through numerous chemical and hormonal changes during a heart attack, and i believe some of them are just trying to compensate the acute heart failure; through your brain or through some reflex mechanism, contracting certain muscles in the spine and creating a spine curvature, usually asymmetric (due to asymmetry of the position of the heart in the chest, there's more discussion in the paragraph below about this) that can put pressure on the nerves directly or through the extension of the asymmetrically pressured disks, creating the pain sensation.

(I read a few days ago about the importance of the position during sleeping. On the right side, it's better for the heart because there's less pressure and "more room" for the heart due to the position relative to other organs. Why heart needs more room to work? Because heart, like any muscle, can only contract but not expand. It expands only through relaxation when it regains its shape and only if there's no pressure on it allowing the blood to flow inside due to venous pressure. If you put pressure or lay other organs on it, it's not going to have room to expand. Things are aggravated by obesity, cause the intra and extra abdominal fat adds pressure to the abdominal cavity and inside the chest through diaphragm and hiatal hernias to the point that is making your stomach touch the bottom of your heart. Gas and abdominal bloating is another factor. One good sign that your heart does not have enough room to expand are palpitations triggered by your stomach touching the heart through hiatal hernias.)

The Two Ways or The Twilight

There are two major different ways of succeeding. The classical one, through (guided from parents and different schools), individual way. Constant effort and learning can eventually lead you in a stable position in society with stable relationships, family, friends, job.

The other way is much faster. Bowing your individuality to different associations, occult or not, bigger or smaller, that in the end can be affiliated to only one in a social pyramid like type of structure. In this case you have to pass first and constantly in time all kind of (initiation) rituals, most of them being secret as probably going on the other side of the law. You become one gear in a big machine, replaceable. Obedience is the key. You apparently get instead everything one could achieve through the first method and more.

When i was working at IMU Bacău in Romania one day my boss came to me and said the unexpected. "You should become member of the communist party". It was not considered an honour any more at that time. But it was essential if you wanted to climb your way into the company. But it was too late. 8 month before the revolution came. But i still remember the meeting of the "base" organization in the company. I had to memorize and recite the swear in statement in front of several hundred members. Actually in the rear cause i stood up when reciting from one of the latest rows in a huge room where everybody was siting.

Nowadays every once in a while usually in September i see in the news about the death of one or several students during initiation ceremonies in fraternities. It is more of a game compared to probably what they have to go through in the initiations of the real big important frats. But in a sense children are known to be tougher than adults when playing and imitating the big guys. Crossing the line may be also be an unconscious form of protest to the abuse. But in essence you give yourself up in front of the members of the frat drinking until they are satisfied while depending on them to stop you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_of_the_Idols

Just read the first paragraph in the link above. First my thought went to Thor. Then to my older obsession. Why is satanism associated with goats or rams? Could it be because of the way male goats or rams confront each other or defend themselves? The butt-head. Can one imagine the shock to the brain a butt-head can do? Or generally any kind of shock when somebody is in a state of relaxation? Like me on October 26 last year when i was hit while in my truck from behind by another car in an intersection when i was about to pass out anyways because of the smoke from the neighbours i inhaled all day? Steel bumper to steel bumper, almost no trace, but got headaches for a couple of weeks later? Or even when the neighbour's slamming door and stomping on the stairs when trying to read something or especially when you read something and don't like and get mad? Sudden noise can bring a storm of neurotransmitters and if repeated you can get depleted of calcium or potassium and even faint or go into fibrillation. And it can definitely alter your thought pattern, your day, your week and generally your life.

Sanskrit Words with English Resonance

After looking for Romanian words of possible Sanskrit etymologies and browsing thousands of words in Sanskrit dictionaries, i stumbled upon a number of English words that sound very close to Sanskrit ones and to me the etymologies i found for those words in different English dictionaries are not satisfying anymore.

Everething Bell €

Although i have a degree in Mechanics, i am (was) specializing in Machine Tools. Never studied a thing about motors or compressors. All i know is from fixing my cars and negotiating with mechanics (diagnosing the cars for them so i can tell them exactly what's wrong and save money.)

So i never knew what a fridge compressor look like. Until today. But i don't want to talk about the compressor itself. In a way it's just a reversed engine. It's got a motor and a cylinder with a crankshaft and a piston or more.

What i want to talk about it's the encassing. It looks exactly like two bells put together. The lower bell covers a biger piece of metal with some sort of maze that is not vibrating and actually dampens the vibration of the compresor. But the upper bell, shorter, covers the noisy part.

Problem is the bells themselves are kinda thin and vibrate like ... bells! Alhough it covers most of the noise from the compressor, they vibrate in turn to their own resonance frequencies. So you have to dampen that as well.

The designer's solution is the evaporating pan in top of the upper bell. It is tightened to the bell with a bolt and nut and glued as well.

When i moved into the appartment, the evaporating pan was full of some stuff that i still don't know what was made of, probably mineral insulation from the attic or from under the bathroom that somehow made its way in the appartment and ended  in the water in the evaporating pan and in time got glued with the formaldehyde resin that was evaporating from the fiberboard floor and re-polymerized in there.

It was stinking really bad so i had to remove it using a screwdriver, it took me and my wife a couple of hours to do so.

I diverted the water from the freeze-thaw cycle in a one gallon water container that i had to empty monthly. I did that because it was collecting water from the air, acting like a dehumidifier. But the pan was leaking as well and i didn't know until recently, again. And i took it off and i saw it was glued to the upper bell. But the glue was probably very cheap stuff and the pan separated from the bell and the bell was vibrating producing ultrasound. But when i took it out, the level of ultrasound increased suddenly. And actually started to have back pain, hands pain, all kind of pains.

The lower bell was installed on four rubber mounts that shrank and allowed it to rattle at low frequencies.

These days i rebuilt the mounts, retighten the bushings, glued back the pan with sillikon seal, and fill the pan wiht gypsum.

I don't know if i cut all the vibrations, but it is definetelly a low quiter now. But my ears are still ringing. My wife can't hear a thing. Tomorrow i'm going to try to see if i can dampen the high frequencies a little bit more.

I even tried to wrap the bells in rags and it works pretty well but it heats up too much and had to remove them.